There are several remarkable trends in the IT field. Business-automation and acceleration technologies, open and industry-strength standards, adaptive architectures, facilitating frameworks, best practices for software engineering, converged platforms, Cloud infrastructures, lean processes, design patterns, enabling tools, and key implementation guidelines are flourishing for simplified IT, which is more tuned for business and customer-centricity. Businesses are consciously striving to achieve strategic transformations on their business operation model, the information captured, catalogued and stocked, and for sharply enhancing the user-experience in the extremely connected world.

The device ecosystem is growing faster with the ready availability of gadgets for personal and professional use. The application landscape is on the climb with the addition of Cloud, social, mobile and sensor services. Then, there are introspective middleware solutions built to integrate disparate, distributed and decentralised systems and data sources. Amongst the most captivating technologies, the Cloud technology stands out.

Clouds as the next-generation IT Infrastructure

As we all know, the Cloud paradigm has laid the foundation for fulfilling the grand vision of IT infrastructure optimization through a seamless synchronization of several enterprise-scale and mission-critical technologies. This pioneering evolution has impacted business as well as IT. Clouds are being positioned as the highly consolidated, virtualized, and shared and automated IT environments for hosting and compactly delivering a galaxy of diverse IT resources and business services for anyone, anytime and anywhere through any device and service. That is, all kinds of services, applications and data are now being modernized and migrated to Cloud platforms and infrastructures in order to reap all the Cloud’s benefits to end users and businesses.

Cloud Computing has become a versatile IT phenomenon and has inspired many to come out with a number of -centric services, products and platforms that facilitate scores of rich applications. There have also been a variety of generic and specific innovations in the form of best practices for managing the rising complexity of IT and enhancing IT agility, autonomy and affordability.

All of the improvisations happening in the IT landscape with the adaption of Cloud are helping worldwide business enterprises to achieve the venerable mission of “achieving more with less.” Thus, Cloud as the core infrastructure and driver behind the business changes taking place today lead to a brighter future for all businesses.

The Eruption of Big Data Computing

The most noteworthy trend today is the data explosion. As there are more machines and sensors deployed and managed in our everyday environments, machine-generated data has become much larger than the man-generated data. Furthermore, the data structure varies from non-structured to semi-structured and structured style, and there are pressures to unearth fresh database systems, such as Cloud-based NoSQL databases in order to swiftly capture, store, access and retrieve large-scale and multi-structured data.

Data velocity is another critical factor to be considered in order to extract actionable insights and to contemplate the next-course of actions. There are Cloud integration appliances and solutions in order to effortlessly integrate date across Clouds – private, public and hybrid.

Besides Big Data storage and management, Big Data analytics has become increasingly important as data across Cloud, social, mobile and enterprise spaces needs to be identified and aggregated, subjected to data mining, processing and analysis tasks through well-defined policies in order to benefit any organization. The Hadoop framework, commodity hardware and specific data appliances are the prominent methods being used to accommodate terabytes and even petabytes of incongruent data, empowering executives, entrepreneurs and engineers to make informed decisions with actionable data. The data architecture for new-generation enterprises will go through a tectonic shift, and leading market watchers predict that Big Data management and intelligence will become common and led to the demise of conventional data management solutions.

Clouds are set to become the optimised, adaptive and real-time infrastructure for Big Data storage, management and analysis. I have authored a book with the title, “Cloud Enterprise Architecture.” I have written extensively about the positive impacts of the transformative and disruptive Cloud technology on enterprises. I have also written about the futuristic enterprise data architecture with the maturity and stability of the Cloud paradigm. In a nutshell, with Cloud in connivance with mobile, social and analytic technologies, the aspects such as business acceleration, automation and augmentation are bound to see a drastic and decisive growth.

Dr. Pethuru Raj is an enterprise architecture (EA) consultant in Wipro Technologies, Bangalore, India. He has been providing technology advisory service for worldwide companies for smoothly enabling them to transition into smarter organizations. He has been writing book chapters for a number of technology books (BPM, SOA, Cloud Computing, enterprise architecture, and Big Data) being edited by internationally acclaimed professors and professionals. He has authored a solo book with the title “Cloud Enterprise Architecture” through the CRC Press, USA.